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Can Systematic Theology become 'Pastoral'

Again, and Pastoral Theology 'Theological'?
Sarah Coakley ABC Religion and Ethics 24Jul2017

Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and Honorary
Canon of Ely Cathedral. She is the author of God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay "On the Trinity"
and, most recently, The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God.

Where did the term "pastoral theology" come from, and why was the university curriculum ever
carved up so that pastoral or practical theology occupied a completely different division from
systematic theology or theological ethics?

The story is complicated, but fortunately there are a number of excellent scholarly treatments of the
history involved.

In fact, it was in the 1980s and early 1990s that theological education seemed to recognize itself in a
new crisis in the United State, spawned as much by shrinking membership in the Protestant
denominations as anything else.

A spate of books was published examining the roots and causes of this malaise. Many rightly
returned to Schleiermacher's Berlin of the early nineteenth century, and the fateful moment when it
was decided under Schleiermacher's leadership to accommodate theology - and especially the
training of ministers in ecclesial theology- in the "professional school" status at the edges of the new
Enlightenment-inspired Humboldt university.

As David Kelsey points out in his excellent study Between Athens and Berlin, this repositioning of
theology in the modern, Enlightenment vision of the research university left it in a position of
considerable ambiguity.

On the one hand, it seemed that theology had been rescued honourably from exclusion from the
university on any sort of creeping secularist grounds; and its professional status was rendered newly
heightened by placing ministerial training on a par with the equivalently rigorous university training
for medicine or law.

In short, theology had apparently been rescued from potential exile and ghettoization in the
seminaries.

On the other hand, two other things had also happened simultaneously which were less remarked on
at the time but were to affect future replications of this model in the liberal university divinity
schools of the New World in particular ways.

First, Schleiermacher's own systematic theology, the Glaubenslehre, famously turned to "feeling"
(not feelings, note) as the fundamental root of our relation to God, and then proceeded to "unpack the
religious consciousness" as he re-ordered the classic loci of the Calvinist dogmatic tradition. This

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involved in Schleiermacher's case a highly complex set of "borrowings" from other branches of
study (ethics, hermeneutics, philosophy of religion); but at the heart of Schleiermacher's vision lay
an intentional evasion from making Christian theology reliant on either rational demonstration or
ethical imperatives.

While this had obvious short-term advantages in the wake of Kant's critiques, and indeed - on my
reading of Schleiermacher - was even an uncannily brilliant anticipation of certain non-
foundationalist moves of the later twentieth century, it nonetheless sowed certain unfortunate seeds
for the rather different idea of an affectively-oriented, and even anti-rational, rendition of theology
which would have its proper place in the professional formation of the clergy for the church's
practical business of pastoral service. More of that shortly.

Second - and here the comparison with what happened in contrast in Oxford and Cambridge in
England is instructive - Schleiermacher's "modern" idea of the theological professional school had
actually edged theology for ever out of the preeminent position it had exercised as "queen of the
sciences" in the great medieval universities of Europe, and which place, though duly modified, it had
nonetheless retained at the Reformation in England in a new form with the establishment of the
Regius chairs of Divinity at both Cambridge and Oxford after Henry's dissolution of the monasteries.

The birth of actual "theological colleges" in England (for the formation of clergy outside the parish;
previously, they had simply been apprenticed there under an experienced priest or mentor) came
much later, in the late nineteenth century, and then some of the leading ones were clustered in
Oxford and Cambridge around the existing theological faculties, which still maintained their
intellectual place at the heart of the university, alongside philosophy, mathematics, classics and the
other scientific disciplines. Truth, rational truth, was still implicitly theology's business in England,
even though the training of clergy was merely derivative from it.

But the matter had taken a different turn in Berlin, and perhaps fatally so. David Kelsey sums up
Schleiermacher's ambiguous inheritance in Berlin, in contrast, in this way:

"Schleiermacher's argument ... seems to leave him in a bind. If we agree with him, he
has given a strong sociological reason for including theology in a research university;
but the very notion of a research university seems necessarily to exclude theology."

Something had shifted here decisively, and ground had been given; Schleiermacher's "professional"
theology was in danger ultimately of becoming "practical" or "pastoral" theology in a later American
reception of his inheritance, loosed from any moorings of rational accountability at the central
debating table of the university.

I am jumping over many complex historical developments when I now mention in addition the
extraordinary impact of modern psychology on clerical training in North America in the twentieth
century and beyond, largely through the influence of Anton Boisen - himself, amazingly, a recurrent
psychotic, and also the founder of the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) movement.

Boisen's genius was to insist that clergy are best formed by the "living documents" presented to them
in the form of the lives and sufferings of the mentally ill. As one who has passed through this CPE
fire myself, in both a general hospital and a mental hospital, I can testify that those "living
documents" of the suffering are the ones which teach one most profoundly; but unfortunately the
theology that goes along with CPE is often derisory, mere anti-intellectual shavings from the table of
university theological discourse.

Kelsey and others have highlighted how the "Berlin" model of theological education clashed and
mingled in America with what Kelsey calls the older "Athens" model: the idea that theological

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formation consists not in professional skills as such but in a process of paedaia or personal
transformation en route to theological maturity.

Unfortunately, this forced marriage of "Berlin" and "Athens" produced some strange offspring, ably
assisted by the creeping psychologization of theology in clerical training rendered by Boisen and
others: "pastoral theology" became a matter of the acquisition of certain professional skills, with
theological accompaniments which were at best derivative from systematic theology, and at worst
anti-intellectual replacements of systematic theology with seemingly virtuous goals such as "global
justice" which were strangely untheorized.

Yet the division between pastoral or practical theology and systematic theology had by this time
become cavernous and deeply problematic in many university divinity schools: "pastoral theology"
was somehow intellectually second-rate, although no one was meant to say that out loud; and when
ranged against the bombastic new intellectual confidence of a theological movement such as John
Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy, with its denigration of "liberation theology" and its resistance to all
collusions with social science renditions of the theological terrain, Boisen and all his works looked
elderly, frail and radically unchic.

Yet by this time CPE was the one form of undertaking for ministry that all Christian denominations,
ironically, and even some Jewish seminaries, could agree on as indispensable. It was just that it had
got unhitched from any serious intellectual engagement with systematic theological questions.

Autobiographical Reflections

It is at this point that I must insert a brief autobiographical aside about what I learnt in the course of
my own training for the priesthood, now more than fifteen-years ago; for to a significant extent it is
fuelling the point I want to make about "pastoral theology."

First, I was of course an academic theologian and philosopher of religion long before I was a priest,
and the shift into clerical training made that a doubly difficult transition: all priestly formation is
necessarily a sort of breaking, however blessed, and I certainly did not escape such. I went through
all the painful processes of humiliation that my own students were required to undertake, and I am
glad and grateful that that was the case.

An internship in a Boston jail where I was invited to teach practices of silent prayer to the inmates,
and prayed with them each week; a year's varied CPE in a Catholic hospital in the Boston area; and
summers at the mental hospital outside Oxford where my English parish was also based: these were
the contexts of my ministerial formation. But there were severe frustrations even in the deep
stretching and fulfilment that this training involved.

First, the theology that was on offer to accompany the profundity of the "living documents" I
encountered was thin gruel indeed: if this was "pastoral theology" then I felt I could well do without
it. Most of it was warmed-over tid-bits from an earlier generation of systematics, one which had in
any case signally failed to re-ignite excitement about pastoral ministry in itself. The rest of it was
light-weight spirituality, so-called, which acted as a sort of palliative but did not probe the big
theological and philosophical questions about unjust suffering and untimely death that any CPE
candidate will inevitably encounter in the wards. So the "pastoral theology" served up to us trainees
was decidedly sub-standard.

Secondly, I was struck that in my time in the Boston jail I was up against a nexus of issues which no
one seemed adequately to have probed in relation to one another - or at least no one seemed to have
probed theologically. There was the harsh legal response to minor drugs offences; the racialized

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policy of policing in the "black" area of Boston; the deliberate brutalizing and further criminalizing
of young men in impossibly cramped cell conditions in the jail; and the scarcely-veiled threat by the
jail authorities towards chaplains and other well-wishers that any dimensions to their ministry that
might be construed as politically subversive would be harshly riposted and repressed.

The fact that corporate prayer and stillness was obviously an act of resistance and solidarity against
brutality and bullying did not escape the guards; but they chose to condone it provided no actual
outbreaks of overt resistance emerged from it. In short, the chaplain was there merely to slide
surreptitiously through any gaps left by an unwieldy and often brutal system of "justice."

In the hospital, by contrast, the problem was the opposite. Visiting was allowed and actively
encouraged, despite the inevitable element of chaos this produced in the wards. But "religion" as
such, even in a Roman Catholic hospital such as I served, was kept tightly under wraps. I was given
an absurd badge when I arrived which announced that I was a "spiritual services" intern - I was
seemingly supplying goods competitively just as any good business person would do.

The overriding atmosphere was thus of pluralistic political correctness - a sort of naive religious
"preferentialism" that bespoke some kind of underlying ethical relativism. But at the same time, one
was aware of the juggernaut of Roman Catholic authority ready to impose itself if necessary: a fleet
of nuns were ever in the corridors waiting to post sacraments into dying mouths.

I was struck again by the strange lack of robustly theological thinking, and at the same time by the
way that doctors in the hospital invariably ignored chaplains, however effective they were being with
the more difficult patients. Only once in a whole year at the hospital did a doctor ask my advice as a
chaplain or request that I do something to aid his attempts to get patient cooperation: a psychotic
patient with diabetes was resisting standard tests for vital signs, and in desperation he turned to me
for aid. But for the most part the clinical medical behemoth was taken to be unassailable, even in a
Catholic hospital; and that same behemoth had no answers to the pressing existential questions about
frailty, death and final purpose which hung so palpably about the wards.

The questions that pressed for me, then, as I reached the end of a life-changing diaconal year in the
jail and on the wards, were:

How could one avoid, as a priest/theologian, the merely "heart-warming stories" approach to
the theological realities of the jail and hospital, institutions which ironically had originally
been created for Christian purposes, but which had long been ceded to secularized forces in
medicine and the criminal justice system?
What sort of robust theological approach would not merely succumb to those forces in
advance, selling out precisely by means of a weakened form of compliant and psychologized
"pastoral theology"?
How might one re-think the relation of high theological intellect, properly affective response,
and insightful institutional and political nous so as to train students from the start in the
university to negotiate the boundaries between theology, medicine, policy and law in a new
way, and to resist concocting a poor-relation type of theological discourse just to prove that it
is "pastoral"?
How, in short, could systematic theology become properly "pastoral" again, without losing any
of its intellectual rigour or coherence?

In the remaining portions of this article I shall start to attempt to answer these questions.

Wicked Problems: Pastoral Theology in Jail and the Hospital

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Raymond Barfield has spoken of the "wicked problems" that afflict the realm of religion and
medicine. A wicked problem, as he puts it, is a problem that is "so complex and challenging that you
cannot even say what it is it until you start to try to solve it, and fail." Such, he suggests, is the state
of affairs today when modern medicine pursues the denial of death - at all costs, quite literally - and
resolutely refuses space for challenges from a properly theological account of our human frailty and
mortality.

Such "wicked problems" do indeed constitute the stuff of pastoral work in jail and hospital; and I
want to spell this point out a little further before suggesting the beginning of a project to ameliorate
the "wicked problem" of pastoral theology, tout court.

Jail

Consider the act of prayer, especially corporate silent prayer, in the jail context. To the cynical guard
on duty, this might seem weird if not pointless: why are these men, well known as violent and
disruptive presences, suddenly disposing themselves into silent and peaceful solidarity with one
another? Is not the whole jail system designed to keep them at odds, and so to divide and rule them?

I have written elsewhere of the extraordinary spiritual and theological power of such a regular
practice in the jail context, when undertaken well: bodies change and acquire new stature, strange
and unexpected friendships develop, the hostilities of the prison "system" are subtly bucked in a new
way by sheer patient vulnerability. Young men recently disoriented by drug withdrawal acquire a
means of resistance to physical craving. As one inmate remarked to me, after only his first session of
such practice: "I get it; this is to teach me patience. This is the opposite of drugs."

There is, of course, no magic bullet here: embodied practice is of the essence. But with it necessarily
comes a theology: a theology of transformation, forgiveness and redemption (for which purposes,
ironically, the modern American prison system was originally designed); a theology of the body and
its labile capacity for change in response to the Spirit's calling; a theology of race and racism's
radical undoing and reconfiguration through the liberation of prayer.

For if, as J. Kameron Carter has argued, the Enlightenment concocted the modern category of race
and made it the unacceptable opposite of its enlightening project, then, in reverse, and by the
mysterious and ironically "dark" processes of the transformative practice of silence, the crushing
restriction of that white man's epistemic project begins to be undone, and even the fearfulness of the
"hole" (solitary confinement) starts to lose its force as the self struggles towards a new integration
and poise.

So this is a theological project, a substantial and systematic project intimately connected to the
doctrine of God, the doctrine of the human and the doctrine of redemption. It follows then that to
trivialize it as a mere "pastoral theological" mopping up of distress is also to trivialize its potential
political importance and impact.

Yet something else needs to happen if this set of theological insights are to join hands with the
exponents of legal history and criminology to explain how we have arrived with the jail system as
we have it in predominantly non-white parts of our major cities and how we can transform and
ameliorate the status quo. The wicked problem will remain wicked, then, if the theological
dimension of the analysis is repressed: it does indeed represent an irreducible dimension of the
realities of the jail and of the inmates' capacity for change and hope.

Hospital

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Permit me a second example of a "wicked" pastoral problem, this time from my work in the United
Kingdom - in my parish just outside Oxford. The church here in Littlemore was built by John Henry
Newman in the years before his conversion, and it was constructed in a village that had long been
known for its social difficulties (and is still known for such). Even as Newman was raising money to
build the church, the city of Oxford was also erecting, not far down the road, the "poor house"
version of its Victorian provision for the mentally ill.

Right from the start, then, the mental hospital at Littlemore and the church have had a symbiotic
relationship, and when inmates of the hospital feel well enough to take a little stroll to the village it
is always the church that they visit first, many of them fired up initially by religious psychosis. We
have grown used as a parish to certain minor disruptions and excitements during the services, then,
and the parishioners are remarkably patient and welcoming of all comers.

I well recall one regular schizophrenic visitor, whose visage, clothes and hair were frightening
enough to make people actually cross the road when they saw him coming, remarking to me after a
service of communion: "I really like it here. The best bit is when everyone shakes my hand."

What then exactly is the "wicked problem" enshrined here? The perennial issue for us clergy in the
parish is that the medical treatment at the hospital is almost entirely drugs-based and tends to see all
religious interest as pathological and delusory. The official National Health line does not regard
chapel worship at the hospital as anything other than a distracting "aside." But the fact that in its
psychotic form religious fantasy is indeed delusory does not detract from the importance of
theological thinking and doing in at least some of the patients' path to recovery.

One of our long-term schizophrenic parishioners "descended into hell," as he put it, for the first time
when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge; he remains subject to sudden reversals of health, but
has been able in recent years to return to part-time extra-mural study and to live in a half-way house.
During his many years associated with the hospital (either in it or nearby) he has formed a support
group for other schizophrenics which has the chapel at the hospital and the parish church as its two
points of worshipping focus.

What is remarkable about this group is that they defy the normal patterns of schizophrenia by
refusing to become isolates. Moreover, they report to me that if they are faithful in their
commitments to worship together at the chapel or church their "voices" are significantly dampened
and they feel a greater strength to resist despair. Theological conversations with this group of people
are invariably rich and strange: sometimes, to be sure, they are obsessed with questions of blood
guilt and redemption, but often their ideas are uncannily theologically acute and richly laden with
biblical allusion. For them, the parish church is a place of sanctuary and often a place of real healing.

Whither "Pastoral Theology"?

We have by now seen the "wicked problem" dangers of a merely anodyne "pastoral theology"
approach to fundamental issues in chaplaincy work in the prison and hospital. As things stand, there
are intractable limitations on chaplaincy work and its efficacy granted the huge and unchallenged
power of the secularized institutions of prison and hospital.

The questions I now want to ask as a climax and end to this article are:

What can we imagine would change the current status quo, in which "pastoral theology" is
merely an ancillary step-child both to the powers of modern clinical medicine and the criminal
justice system, and even also to the systematic theology being brokered in the PhD programme
of the university?

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How can we alleviate the seemingly intractable theological limitations that chaplaincy work
finds itself in, and at the same time expand its goals and vision?
How can the medical and legal professions be persuaded that there are genuinely theological
materials that fall under their purview and demand attention?

A New Role for Divinity Schools in the University

I have only two highly practical suggestions to make at the close of this article, and I hope they are
not overly-utopian.

Interdisciplinary Cooperation

After I had finished my ministerial training and become a priest associate in a parish in the Boston
suburbs, I started to investigate the possibility of teaching shared courses with members of the
Medical and Law Schools at Harvard. The purpose of this was to bring a whole group of highly
motivated and creative students together - from the Medical and Divinity School for one course, and
from the Law and Divinity School for another. In concert with outstanding senior faculty members
from these two other institutions, courses were devised that involved thematic treatments of key
controversial topics (for example: pain, death and healing in the Medicine and Religion course; and
punishment, restitution and forgiveness in the Law and Religion course).

In each case a cluster of short interdisciplinary readings were set for each major topic, and a probing
theological question set alongside a more practical, legal or scientific set of issues. The students were
also paired up with students from the other institution for joint projects and tutorials. Had I had
further time I would have orchestrated a set of constellating case study questions which would throw
light on the interdependence of theological and medical or legal understanding in the case of each
question. There is no reason why case-study work, utilizing the Socratic method, shouldn't be a norm
for theological interaction as it is elsewhere in the university.

It is hard to say whether proposed courses such as these, instituted in friendship between senior
professors in the different Schools, and training top students together in thinking their disciplines
through in relation to each other could, over the years, effect the desired opening up of genuine
dialogue between the disciplines. But at the very least, it seems to me, this plan could help students
practise what it is to think out of the usual boxes in relation to a "wicked problem."

These three-way conversations are urgent and immediate, then, whether or not they become
embedded in to the curriculum as a disciplined means of interdisciplinary discussion.

Systematic Theology as "Theologie Totale"

My further suggestion is correlative to this, and concerns how systematic theology is to be written
and promulgated given the need to link it tightly now to political conversations which "borrow" from
its various systematic loci. The urgency here is keep what was formerly the disconnected and
depotentiated "pastoral theology" tightly linked to the heart of the systematic project.

But this, as I argue in my own systematic work, can only be done well if systematic theology knows
itself to be necessarily embedded in the "field," and to have its doctrines tested and purified as much
through an analysis of the prayer and worship that sustains it as in its outworkings in the world, and
particularly in the state institutions of healing and punishment.

This is a large task, to be sure. But its challenge opens up the possibility of a number of different
configurations of the systematic task, and a rich set of possibilities for what has traditionally been

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called political, rather than systematic, theology. But again, it would seem to me preferable not to
divorce the "political" from the "systematic." What I have proposed in my own systematic theology
is that we consider a title like "theologie totale," on the analogy of the French "l'histoire totale"
school, in which every level and context of theology's operation is systematically considered.

Restoring the Rigour of Ministry

Finally, let me return to the much-maligned Schleiermacher. In resisting his move to

"professionalize" theology from the outset, I do not wish to be heard as supporting unprofessional
accounts of the theological task - far from it. Instead, the vision I am laying out would include
nothing less than a reconfiguration of the divisions of the curriculum such that the division of
ministry would no longer sit alongside the other divisions as "practical" rather than more strictly
"academic."

Then, at last, it would become apparent that the interdisciplinary subtlety required of so much of the
best work in theology that is girded for action requires more intelligence, verve and imagination than
a theology entirely spun out of taking thought.

And if such theology is to prove its worth, it will be the first to acknowledge that its outworkings are
embodied transformations, forms of prayer and witness that do not simply link to law and medicine,
but have the capacity to energize and transform even them.

Sarah Coakley is the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and Honorary
Canon of Ely Cathedral. She is the author of God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay "On the
Trinity" and, most recently, The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God. An
earlier version of this article was presented at the Convocation and Pastors' School at Duke
Divinity School.

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